Don't Trust Anyone Under 30, Either

I was flipping through a book at a friend's house recently which blamed the Beatles and Bob Dylan (!) for the downfall of society. Conservatives hate the 60's so much that it is hard to understand. I think they genuinely think that everything was better in the 50's and before then. It is really hard to imagine how they come to this conclusion, but it no doubt has to do with a combination of nostalgia, confirmation bias, a fear of women, and a healthy dose of repressed racism. I don't, of course, wish for the deaths of these sticks in the mud, but it is happy to think that when they are gone, their particular brand of backwards thinking will be gone with them. However, seeing these books strewn about on the beds and bookshelves of my contemporaries makes me fear that the faulty and harmful ideas of the past will never really stop hampering us. This is just temporary gloom, though, and dwelling on it is just the kind of thinking these people love. Whether they can see it or not, whether they believe it or not, the world is actually a better place in a lot of ways than it was even decades ago. Of course there is no convincing people whose arguments are based on fuzzy memories of when people were just nicer, but a look at history assures us that man will continue to stumble towards the future and that we shall, indeed, overcome. It is just so depressing that there are people who refuse to pick up the pace, or, rather, let people with more brains in their heads pick up the pace for them. The point is that the son of The Man often grows up to be The Man, but we gotta keep on keepin' on.